Artists' Projects at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 2008-2013

This retrospective surveys the first five years of the project series The Front Room at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. The artists include Claire Fontaine, Kerry James Marshall and Tris Vonna-Michell.

An Anthology of Writings

Assembled by the pioneering scholar of performance art, RoseLee Goldberg, this volume documents new performances by some of the world's most exciting visual artists, focusing on the relationship between contemporary dance and visual art, the ongoing legacy of "Happenings" inventor Allan Kaprow and the recent explosion of performance in China. Photographs, artists' scripts, sketches, journals and storyboards are complemented by writings from prominent curators and critics, as well as interviews with Paul McCarthy, Dan Graham, Isaac Julien, Yvonne Rainer, Nathalie Djurberg, Jérôme Bel and others.

Published by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.By Anthony Huberman.

Curated by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the group exhibition and catalogue For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There explores the speculative nature of knowledge and insists on the importance of curiosity and the things we don't understand. Arranged around the premise that the world--and art--is not a code that needs cracking, the works in the exhibition center on the fruitfulness of not-knowing, un-learning, and productive confusion. David Hullfish Bailey, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Fischli & Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Giorgio Morandi, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel and others present explanations that playfully don't explain. Dedicated to the inquisitive mind, For The Blind Man celebrates our ability to get lost and the stories we use to find our way in the dark. The book is edited, arranged and designed by London-based writer Will Holder and includes a new essay by curator Anthony Huberman.

Published by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.Introduction by Anthony Huberman. Conversation between John Armleder, Oliver Mosset.

Documenting the recent two-person exhibition by Conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset--close friends for more than 20 years--this volume proposes an active juxtaposition of parallel, and opposite, artistic approaches. Mosset is the consummate Minimalist, while Armleder pushes the aesthetic conventions of beauty to their excessive limit.

RoseLee Goldberg amazed with PERFORMA 05, billed as the city's first biennial of 'visual art performance.' Working with a tiny staff, a shoestring budget and no institutional affiliation, Ms. Goldberg put together a program that covered a lot of aesthetic bases--old school, just out of school, high-tech, no-tech--and encompassed more than 60 scheduled events… all of which makes the prospect of PERFORMA 07 shine with promise. --Roberta Smith, the New York Times This volume is the first in a series of important publications drawing content and inspiration from the PERFORMA biennial. Featuring inventive documentation by the 100 artists who made the first PERFORMA so extraordinary, it offers an exhilarating view into contemporary visual art performance and "performs" as a collective artists' journal might. Vibrant photographs of each artist's performance are accompanied by their scripts, sketches and storyboards, providing unique insight into process and upending conventions around archiving performance. Lively interviews with some of the most significant artists of our time--including Francis Alÿs, Tamy Ben-Tor, Jesper Just, Marina Abramovic, Gelitin, Laurie Simmons and Mike Smith--appear alongside context-setting essays by some of our most inspired young curators. PERFORMA founder RoseLee Goldberg, who pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present (1979), presents an authoritative introduction addressing the genre's many forms--radio broadcast, dance, live installation, new technologies, film and video, music, historic reconstructions and lecture-as-performance among them. PERFORMA is not only an invaluable reference, it is a new kind of guide to cultural life, a time capsule of this very moment in New York's eminent performance history, complete with profiles of the city's nonprofit biennial venues that, like this book, give ephemeral art a physical place in which to persist.

The works in Animations endow unlikely objects with unexpected and uncanny life. During its century-plus history, animation has continually absorbed, hybridized, mutated and melded disciplines and techniques, undergoing both commercial exploitation and artistic exploration. The latter is documented here, focusing on the cross-continental exchange of artists from around the world who are dialoguing in the collective languages of animation. 28 artists are featured here, including Haluk Akakce, Francis Alÿs, William Kentridge, Kristen Lucas, Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick and Liliana Porter, demonstrating the unique ways in which contemporary visual practitioners address animation as a medium and subject.

Today, video is a familiar tool at the artist's disposal. But to those who experimented with the technology in the 1960s and 70s--when affordable equipment became commercially available--the capabilities inherent in the medium were unknown. Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, among other American pioneers, used videotape to document and extend their performance work. Acconci, for one, produced conceptual, performance-based video work in the 70s that consisted of ruthless interrogations of the artist and viewer, as though defining the video medium were a matter of universal urgency. Video Acts provides a historical overview of video art created for display on a single monitor, with more than 100 pieces, dating from the mid-60s through 2000, including numerous landmarks in the development of this young medium by Marina Abramovic, Gilbert & George, Acconci, Jonas and Nauman, as well as more recent work by Tony Oursler, Darren Almond, Pipilotti Rist and others redefining the genre.

Living in a cramped space where Beverly Hills and Calcutta meet every day, the artists gathered here explore the tension between wealth and poverty, among progress, stagnation, and improvisation, and between the violence and civility that animates the vibrant center that is Mexico City. Compounding the complexity of urban living, high rates of kidnapping, murder and pollution become a daily threat. For the rich, the body becomes an object to be cared for, protected, even exchanged for ransom, while, for an underclass of day laborers, homeless people, and prostitutes, survival depends on participation in physically exploitative situations that place an exact commercial value on the body. Alluding to recent art historical movements such as body art, process art, and arte povera, these artists use everyday objects and situations to form a complex dialogue about Mexico City and its relationship with the first world, focusing on the influence of the global economy on aesthetic values and daily life. Daniela Rossell's series of photographs, Ricas y Famosas, captures the endangered species of the rich and famous in their ornate and overprotective environments, and Francis Als documents people pushing and pulling their wares to and from the marketplace, leveraging their body weight against the commercial value they are physically dragging along.